Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Civilization and Sludge

The emergence of domestication and agriculture allowed humankind
to produce more food per area of land, but this innovation also resulted in
myriad unintended consequences, many of which were unsustainable.One of my favorite essays is Civilization
& Sludge, by Abby A. Rockefeller.It describes the evolution of how people dealt with the production of
human excrement, a process that never ends. Like everything else in the human saga, the
history begins simple and sustainable, and over time degenerates into a system
that is complex and energy-guzzling.The
following is mostly a summary of her 16-page essay.

Rockefeller learned that the simplest and most sustainable
sewage treatment system was developed by nomadic foragers.They utilized the same time-proven system
used by non-human animals — depositing their feces and urine on the ground, in
a widely dispersed manner.This recycled
vital nutrients, cost nothing, required no staff or infrastructure, did not
pollute the water, kill the fish, encourage the spread of contagious
water-borne diseases, or produce a single spoonful of toxic sludge.This brilliant system works very well in
societies having low population density.

With the advent of agriculture, the supply of food increased,
the population increased, the output of sewage increased, and the old system
failed completely.This inspired the
clever invention of smelly outhouses and cesspools.This new technology recycled nutrients less
effectively than the nomadic forager system.

The flush toilet grew in popularity during the nineteenth
century, as municipal water systems came into fashion.Municipal water systems increased the
production of wastewater, which overwhelmed the old cesspools.The cheap and dirty solution was open sewers
— ditches beside the streets where sewage from the cesspools was drained.It’s no coincidence that cholera became a
very popular disease at this time.

This inspired the development of closed-pipe sewage systems,
which moved the wastes out of town — into lakes, streams, and oceans, where
nature would (in theory) purify it all.On the plus side, cholera rates dropped.On the downside, typhoid became popular among downstream residents who
got their water from sewage-laden streams.Once upon a time, the Thames River of England was filled with salmon,
and supported a thriving fishery.Then
came the new and improved sewage systems, which killed the fish, and turned the
Thames into one of the most polluted rivers on Earth.

This inspired cities to filter the drinking water pumped from
tainted waterways.Typhoid rates
dropped.But filtering did not remove
the sewage from the rivers, and rapid growth in the industrial sector was
adding large quantities of other pollutants, including toxics.

This inspired cities to treat waste before dumping it into
waterways.Treatment systems have been
evolving over the years — each new design is more complex, expensive, and
energy-intensive than its predecessor.The wastes and nutrients that used to go into the river are now
concentrated into toxic sludge.

Because the waste discharged from industry varies from place
to place, and day to day, the toxicity of the sludge varies from moderate to
extremely poisonous.The sludge was
dumped into the ocean, where the poisons created dead zones on the ocean
floor.Ocean dumping was outlawed in
1988.At this point, sewage industry
propagandists began presenting toxic sludge as a wonderful fertilizer — beneficial biosolids!This was given to farmers free of
charge.Rockefeller has actually seen
stores selling bags of sewage sludge pellets labelled “natural organic
fertilizer.”

Toxic sludge is low in nitrogen, so it has to be applied in
large quantities to serve as fertilizer.Heavy metals and other toxins in the sludge move into the soil.These toxins are absorbed by plants, and the
animals that eat them.In the soil,
thousands of industrial chemicals can interact, creating a countless
opportunities for unintended and undesirable consequences.

Following the application of toxic sludge at a Georgia dairy
farm, the milk was contaminated with high levels of toxic thallium.Another Georgia farmer watched his herd of
300 cattle die — his free beneficial biosolids happened to contain high levels
of arsenic, heavy metals, and PCBs.Sludge is a hazardous waste.What
do we do with it?Answer: stop making
sludge.Human wastes need to be returned
to the soil, and production of toxic industrial wastes needs to end.

What is the moral of this story?Thou shalt keep society small and
simple.Ants and bees live well in large
complex civilizations.But humans are
not insects.This is an important fact
to remember.